


What Lurks Behind the Looking Glass

by pinstripedJackalope



Series: TGGTVAV Challenge Fics [9]
Category: The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue Series - Mackenzi Lee
Genre: Ahistorical Setting, Angst, Canonical Child Abuse, Character Death, Child Abuse, Definitely horror-esque, Horror, Horror adjacent, Imprisonment, Messages in bottles, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Sirens, Suicidal Thoughts, Taxidermy, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Vomiting, also barely there but definitely implied, barely vomiting but it's there, but he's an asshole so, idk you can probably consider this pre-slash, it's like... later than the books but earlier than the victorians and idk man
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:00:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23812708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope
Summary: When Monty is four years old, his mother steals something very valuable from his abusive father and hides it in his room.  What will he do when he discovers the secret behind it?
Relationships: Henry "Monty" Montague & Percy Newton
Series: TGGTVAV Challenge Fics [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1638925
Comments: 7
Kudos: 21
Collections: TGGTVAV AU Challenge Fics





	What Lurks Behind the Looking Glass

**Author's Note:**

  * For [goldenthunderstorms](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldenthunderstorms/gifts), [em_gray](https://archiveofourown.org/users/em_gray/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Murder at Mirror Manor](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23528497) by [em_gray](https://archiveofourown.org/users/em_gray/pseuds/em_gray). 



> Stole the mirrors and the fantasy-esque setting from Em-Gray’s fic Murder at Mirror Manor!! Also vaguely inspired by Kai Meyers The Water Mirror, emphasis on ‘vaguely’.

[Moodboard by Goldenthunderstorms]

When I was four years old, my mother, fine upstanding woman trapped in an abusive marriage that she was, did the unthinkable. 

…Saying it like that makes it sound like she put rat poison in the beef stew that she served my father one stormy night. She didn’t murder the man—without him this story wouldn’t exist. What she did instead was quite simple—she snuck into the basement, stole something very valuable, and hid it away, all behind my father’s rigid back. 

I remember it the same way I remember dreams—all in fragments, their sharp edges separated by the glint of lantern light cutting through the darkness. My mother, leaning over me, whispering for me to _wake up, baby, Mommy needs you now_. Sitting up and scrubbing my eyes with little fists as she pulled something from the folds of her dress, handing it to me. Its cold weight as she leaned over, prying at the floorboards until one came loose in her hand. Her face, wincing in terror as the house around us creaked—and a sense of loss as she took back the object and placed it beneath the floor, hiding it away.

“It’s our secret,” she breathed, brushing my hair back from my face to press a kiss to my forehead. I fell back to sleep with the smell of her perfume wafting over me, a comfort.

So there it was. The beginning of this story. Not a particularly glory-filled start, but a start nonetheless. And from there the story goes a little like… this.

***

The next morning, I woke to chaos. The strike of wood against plaster was like the clap of thunder, ringing through the house. 

Moving on instinct, I hid myself under my bed, pushing with my feet until my back hit the far wall. Once there I clutched my stuffed teddy to my chest, one little hand crammed in my mouth to stop the whimpers fighting their way out. 

In the next room over my sister, all of one, wailed nonstop. I could hardly hear her over the sound of my father, ranting and raving and hurling furniture downstairs. 

“—BASTARD! SNEAKING ARSE! YOU’RE A CROOKED, WILY _SNAKE—_ ”

“ _Calm down, Henri, we can talk this out_ —” said another man’s voice, projected, I knew, from the scrying stone in the living room. It was tinny, echoing up the stairs. 

Father didn’t even let him finish his sentence. “THERE IS NOTHING TO TALK ABOUT, YOU LYING _BASTARD_!” he screamed, and punctuated the words by throwing something large, heavy, and decidedly metal. The wrought iron coffee table, perhaps. Ceramic shattered, shards pinging about the room. “WHEN I GET MY HANDS ON YOU I’LL WRING YOUR DAMN _NECK_ —”

I covered my ears, letting the whimpers out as I tried desperately to block out the noise. Alas, the shouting continued, sometimes growing muffled and sometimes becoming clearer again, dipping and rising in time with my pounding heart until eventually… finally… it came to a stop. 

I slowly lowered my hands, listening carefully through the sound of the baby’s wails, listening for—

There. Heavy footsteps and heavy breaths, coming up the stairs. 

I pushed my little body further under the bed, teddy clutched tight to my chest. The footsteps came closer, the outline of a shadow peeking through the crack under my bedroom door. There they paused, for just long enough for me to imagine sharp boots thundering across the space between me and the door, a hand reaching under the bed to grasp my ankle, fingers pulling me from the safety of the space under the bed—

But he didn’t. After a moment’s pause, he turned on his heel and marched down the hall to the baby’s room, where he ordered mother to keep her _quiet, damnit_. Then he continued on, to the door of his second-floor study, which he threw open with a great vehemence and slammed closed again once he was safely inside.

***

It took a few minutes, but soon enough the cries and wails quieted. Mother set the cradle rocking, the wooden rockers creaking against the floorboards. Back and forth it went, creak and creak and creak, until the shadows reappeared in the crack under my bedroom door. A moment later, the doorknob of my bedroom door slowly began to turn. 

I winced back, holding my teddy so tight that it hurt, watching as the door slowly and soundlessly began to swing open. I squeezed my eyes closed, tears sliding down my face, but when a voice spoke it was soft, careful. Mother.

I was wriggling out from under the bed in an instant, throwing myself at her.

“Shhh… shhh… it’s okay,” she said, her hand rubbing my back. Then she pried my little hands off her house dress, leaning me back. “Is it still there? Is it safe?” she asked, voice barely a breath. 

At first I didn’t know what she meant, my brain too muddled by the fright of the morning. But as she looked at me, her perfume curling around me, comforting me, I remembered the dream-like fragments of the night before. 

I nodded, sticking my thumb in my mouth. Mother let out a breath, sagging before me. Then she stood, hefting me up to her hip. “Good,” she said. “Now how about you and me go and clean up a little bit, hm?”

And she carried me downstairs, into the wreckage of the livingroom, where the taxidermied heads of great beasts watched as we swept up the shards of once-beautiful vases, mother guiding the broom as I held the dustpan, cleaning up the detritus of father’s rage until it couldn’t be seen except in the minuscule chips in the side of the fireplace, the dent in the leg of the table. We hid away everything there was to hide away, and mother made me pancakes with little bits of chocolate, and she never again brought up the subject of the object lying, like a beating heart, beneath the floorboards of my room.

***

I’ll admit, I wasn’t the brightest of four year olds. I soon forgot about the event altogether, all of it becoming a distant memory that I’d rather not recall. It was three years before I came upon the object once again, quite by accident, after I dropped a coin into the crack between the floorboards under my feet.

My hands were already shaking when I prised up the board, a secondary effect of the love-tap my father had just given me down in the dining room and the reason I’d dropped the coin in the first place. I wasn’t expecting to find much beside the coin, so to have my own reflection staring up at me from the depths of the floor was jarring to say the least. I’d like to say that I didn’t gasp and nearly drop the board. I would be lying.

It was… a mirror. An ornate one, carved from dark mahogany and inlaid with black lacquer and ivory. The glass was dark and murky, though it reflected my white face back at me easily enough. 

I reached a hand slowly down, coin forgotten, and closed my fingers around the handle. It was heavy, I noticed first—not extraordinarily so, but weighted as if it was carved from iron rather than wood. I raised it into the light of the gas lamp sitting on my dresser, turning it this way and that and watching as the glass…

…well…

…it _moved_.

_Like water_ , I thought, mesmerized. That was the only way I could think to describe it. It was as if there was a great, dark pool of water trapped behind the glass, pushing up against it. 

And then, as I watched, a shadow flickered past, there and then gone.

I gasped, and the mirror clattered to the floorboards. The drop wasn’t far enough to break it, thankfully, but it did give me a good startle. Heart pounding, I clutched at my vest, head cocked to listen intently for any sign of anyone having heard the commotion.

…Nothing. I breathed out. Then, oh so carefully, I picked up the mirror once more and peered into it.

It was even more murky up close, like staring through the glass into a great aquarium, one similar to the one father had taken me and Felicity to last summer. On instinct I tapped on the glass, watching carefully for more shadows. I couldn’t tell for certain, but… perhaps there was one? It was more like a haze than anything, a spot in the distance slightly darker than the rest.

…I got the sense that it was watching me.

Feeling slightly uneasy, I tilted my head to the side. Another tap, and the haze moved, twirling slowly around itself. I wondered if it could… well, if it could _hear me_. I couldn’t spy any ear-like parts on it, as it was just a haze, but perhaps… perhaps it could.

Sucking in a lungful of air, I listened again for my father. Then, with measured breaths, I tapped one last time.

And just like that, the haze flit out of view once more.

I turned the mirror this way and that, looking for any sign of it in the gloom. When I found nothing, my shoulders slumped. I stared for a while more, setting the mirror on my pillow so I could lean over it, but soon enough my tired eyes began to close. I dozed off next to the mirror as the gas lamp burned low and the night took over.

***

I woke some time later to a tapping noise, just beside me on the pillow. Blinking slowly, I raised my head to see what it was.

And then nearly fell off the edge of the bed.

It was a hand, a dark bluish green, with webbing like the webbing on a frog’s feet between the fingers. It paused just there, just a few inches on the other side of the glass, before flitting forward to _tap, tap, tap_.

I was frozen, staring, and I could swear my eyes were about to bug out of my face. I had never seen anything like _that_ before—not once in my seven years of life.

I thought, for a moment, of going to my mother. Of showing her the mirror, tapping on it, letting her see the hand on the other side tap back. And yet something… stopped me. A secret, she’d called the mirror—our secret. I knew that if I brought it to my mother, my father would inevitably find it. Mother had hidden it in my room for a reason—I had to keep it hidden, keep it safe.

First, however, I slowly pressed my hand flat against the glass, fingers spreading until they were splayed like a starfish. The hand on the other side jerked back, but I waited with the patience of a kid who had recently learned how to wait for the lightning bugs to land inside the jar before slapping the lid on and trapping them inside. And, in reward, I saw the hand come back. 

It paused just a moment, just an instant, before it came up on the other side of the glass and slowly pressed against it, mirroring mine exactly.

***

By the time I was fourteen years old and my baby sister, Felicity, eleven, I’d found a great comfort in the hand on the other side of the mirror. When my father beat me, when his hand struck my ribs and left my breaths rattling around in my lungs like marbles, I would tap gently on the glass and wait until the hand appeared on the other side. It never once failed to come.

We created games, the two of us—sometimes I would drag my finger around on the surface of the mirror and watch as it followed along on the other side, always a moment behind. Sometimes we would trade beats and create rhythms as we tapped and struck the glass, though never hard enough to crack it. And sometimes… more often than not… we would press our hands together, with nothing but the cold glass between us, resting there together for hours at a time. 

If tears sometimes struck my side of the mirror after a particularly hard day, the hand made no mention of it.

Eventually, usually when morning light began to show through the curtains, I would always draw my hand back and hide the mirror away again. It had started as my mother’s secret, and then our secret, and now it was mine and mine alone—I would protect it for as long as I lived. My father still had no idea that I had the water mirror, and I was determined to keep it that way. 

***

…It was when I was fourteen that my father one day pulled me aside and told me that I’d be learning the family business. My father, he explained to me, was a trader in ‘specialty hunting game’. You wanted to hunt something big? Something violent? Something flashy that would look good stuffed and mounted above your fireplace? He had you covered. And then he took me to the basement and raised up the curtains that hung about the large room, exposing rows and rows and rows of carts, each with four shelves, each shelf lined with simple steel-framed mirrors, eight across and five deep.

…I walked among them with my heart hammering in my chest, daring not to reach out, daring not to touch.

They were pocket dimensions, he explained to me without looking back, expecting me to follow along. I was grateful he didn’t turn to me, for I knew my face would be drawn and pale as I realized… slowly… that it wasn’t just a hand on the other side of the mahogany mirror. It was… a creature, a being. Something alive, and not a figment of my imagination or a beautiful illusion.

…Something that had been trapped, all alone, in a magical water microcosm, for as long as I’d had it.

I had to excuse myself, to get away from all the mirrors. I barely made it out to the garden before I was sick.

***

It was a long time before I took out the water mirror again. I was afraid of it, afraid that by learning its reality the creature inside would turn against me, would try to claw at me from the other side of the glass.

It would only hurt itself if it did, I knew that. My father had explained all the intricacies of the mirrors—how they couldn’t be broken except from the outside, how he used incantations to check on the creatures inside, how the occupants could stay, trapped, for years or decades or lifetimes if someone so chose.

Staring down at the mirror, I took a deep breath and willed myself to tap on the glass.

The hand popped up almost immediately, as if it had been waiting. It tapped back eagerly, three short raps. Then it pressed itself against the glass, fingers spread, waiting.

I bit my lip, my emotions in a sick swirl. It was trapped, it had been trapped for ten years at least—was I not at fault?

But still, the hand waited, and waited, ever patient, tapping one finger every once in a while as if to remind me it was there until I couldn’t stand it anymore—I gave in and pressed my hand to my side of the glass. 

For a long moment I stayed right there, tears flowing down my nose and splattering against the surface of the mirror. Then, all at once, I pulled back, hid the mirror away once more, and left the room to see if I could perhaps snatch one of my father’s cognacs from his study without him noticing.

***

From there things became… easier. Mostly. Because of the cognac or the whiskey or the rum that I helped myself to more and more, I was convinced. It wasn’t cute, I’m sure now. Not glamorous. Not fun. Not when I was up early in the morning vomiting into my mother’s shrubs, stumbling drunk, after having not-great sex with one of the neighborhood girls. Not when I was discovered with my hands on Richard Peele and dear old Dick told everyone who would listen that I forced myself upon him. Not when I left for school at sixteen and was returned home two years later with the reminder that I was too much a sinner for a good upstanding place like Eton, and my father beat me within an inch of my life.

But it was fine. Things at home were fine. Mother had another baby, a little boy, and I didn't think about ending it all. Didn't think about how with one quick dash off the pier there would be no more me to live the facsimile of a life that I’d called my own for far too long. I didn't think about how trapped I felt, how my father hadn’t snapped me up and deposited me in a mirror but he’d managed to squeeze me into a cage all the same. How I couldn’t run, or walk, or breathe.

Everything was fine. Until, one day, I learned the incantation to make the glass of a mirror disappear.

***

Holding my breath, I silently dug my fingernails into the cracks between the floorboards, drawing up the loose one a single aching inch at a time. The mirror was right where I’d left it—sitting below the floor, the water inside dark and murky. I gently lifted it free, placing it on my pillow once again. 

The hand came the moment I tapped on the glass, enthusiastically pressing against it. I tapped until it backed away, gesturing for it to hang back. When it was hovering a few inches away, I breathed out and spoke the incantation into the air.

The glass disappeared, my pale reflection winking out all at once. I stared for a moment, hardly daring believe it real. Then I plunged my hand into the water that had sat stagnant behind glass for more than a decade.

It was cold, frightfully cold. I gasped, goosebumps rising all up my arm. I ignored them, pushing further in. Up to my wrist, and then my forearm, and then my elbow, all the way until I could go no farther, my shoulder blocking the way. Then I stayed there, my fingers spread, waiting with baited breath until…

The hand was nearly as cold as the water, fingertips skirting along my palm. I laughed, stuffing my free hand in my mouth to smother the sound. I’d half expected to be bitten the moment I breached the surface—it would only have been fair, after the years the creature inside had spent with no one but me for company. But the hand, the creature… it was gentle, so gentle, as it slowly threaded its fingers through mine, twining our hands together. I closed my eyes, squeezing gently, holding tight tight tight.

***

I was nineteen, finally old enough to go out on containment trips with my father, when I was suddenly overcome with what seemed like the most brilliant idea I’d ever had.

Most of the creatures my father captured were fae, a people not unlike humans except with magic running through their veins. Pixies, brownies, selkies… they all were of human or greater intelligence. In the olden days, they were known for striking deals with humans, tricking them into giving up their firstborns or their livelihoods with complicated contracts, signed in blood.

Which meant, in short, that they could _read_.

The moment I put the pieces together I nearly vibrated out of my boots. I had to hold my tongue all day, biting down on it lest I gave my father a reason to suspect. Finally, however, we came home, and I danced right past Felicity on my way to my room.

I was careful to lock my door, and careful in the contents of the letter I wrote out. A hello, to start. An introduction—my name, Henry Montague Jr., and my status, and a few things I thought should be known about me. Then I dropped the paper in a spare whiskey bottle I found rolling about under my bed, sealed it tight, and, without further ado, dropped it into the mirror.

It disappeared almost at once.

The wait after that was… long and difficult. I remember pacing about my room, running my hands through my hair, throwing my coat and then my vest off as I began to sweat with nerves. Eventually I could wait no longer and dipped my hand into the water, idly dragging it back and forth in the light current until… finally… I _felt_ it. Not the cool, smooth flesh of the creature’s hand, but the cool, smooth surface of glass. My bottle, returned to me.

Returned to me with the note gone.

It was exciting, an exciting development. I’d never had much incentive to write, but I was suddenly glad I’d learned my letters as I wrote page after page, eagerly dropping them one after the other into the mirror. At first I just wrote my thoughts, my excitement spilling over, each note disappearing just like the first. Soon enough, however, I began asking questions—what the creature was, where it had come from, if it had a name by which I might call it.

I frowned as the bottle came back empty once more. No response. Would it… could it… was it possible that I’d misinterpreted? Perhaps my letters weren’t being read at all—maybe it was eating them all.

Or maybe… more likely… it just didn’t have a pen.

I could have hit myself when I realized. With my next letter I wrote an apology, and shoved a pen and an extra sheet of paper into the bottle. When I dropped the whiskey bottle in I also dropped in an ink bottle. And this time… this time I got a _response_.

_Hello Henry_ , it read. _My name is Percy. It_ _’s nice to finally meet you_.

***

I learned a lot about Percy in not a lot of time. He answered all my questions and more, telling me how he came from the waters near the land of Barbados. He’d been captured as a baby, along with his father, who had soon died of fever. When I asked what manner of sea creature he was, he told me he was a siren, at least according to official documentation. That was the name that the humans had given his people—they called themselves something that I could not read, in a language that looked like winding ant trails. He was very talkative despite being of a solitary sort of species, which made two of us—I stayed up late many nights reading what he told me, eager always to ask for more. Tales of the open sea, about helping humans catch whales, about the legends of his people… and in turn I told him about my mother, stealing his mirror in the dead of night and hiding it away—of my sister, voraciously consuming amatory novels and rolling her eyes so often I feared they’d stick like that—of my drunken exploits with lads and maidens of all walks of life—of my father, and my father’s hands.

I learned quickly that time in the magical microcosm of a mirror moved differently than it did out in our world. Sometimes when I had been gone for hours he told me it had been mere minutes since we last talked. Other times he would be waiting on the other side of the glass before I even arrived, saying that I had been gone much too long. 

I did my best to talk to him whenever I could, and took to tearing apart my books and cramming the pages into bottles when I couldn’t, so that he would have something to occupy his time without me. We bartered stories like traders bartered wares, and to say that I was thrilled does not cover the extent to which my heart fluttered in my chest every time I so much as thought about the water mirror. I had never had someone to talk to so freely, who didn’t demand things of me or snark at every encounter or look upon me sadly across the dinner table. It was… frankly speaking… the happiest I had ever been. For the first time ever, I had a friend.

***

One day I asked if he knew why he was in a mirror so different from all the others. It had struck me many times over the years to wonder, and finally I could ask without fear of bringing my father’s wrath down about me.

It took him a while to respond, and when he did the note was very simple. _I_ _’m special_ , it said. _Put your hand in the water and I_ _’ll show you_.

I was wary of the invitation, but I was even more curious as to what, exactly, he could possibly show me, especially like this. I debated it for as long as I could, but I had never been much for curbing impulses—it took me less than a minute to plunge my hand into the depths. 

I don’t know what exactly I expected. To have my arm torn vindictively from my shoulder? I will admit that the thought crossed my mind, especially when I felt needle-like teeth pressing against the pads of my fingers. But then his hands were there, guiding my fingertips down, over his lip and down his chin to his throat, where he rested them gently. 

I could tell in that moment that he was testing me—waiting to see if I would wrap my fingers around his neck, perhaps. But I didn’t, and he relaxed, and for a moment it was just the two of us, all alone in the entire world, trusting each other entirely.

And then I _felt it_. The _vibration_ , beginning in the beds of my nails, reverberating through the gaps between the bones of my fingers. I could hear nothing through the water, but even so I knew it was his voice, singing to me. It was sweet, honeyed, but also strangely hollow, and I swear to you that I could feel the melancholy notes as if I was holding them in my very hand.

It was then that I knew—one day I would have to free him, and he would leave me, all alone, once more.

***

The first time I shattered a mirror, it was an accident. I’d been pushing a cart of them out to the carriage my father used to transport them to his customers, and one of the mirrors must have been cock-eyed in its slot because the next thing I knew it had rattled its way off completely and struck the driveway with a _smash_.

It was immediate pandemonium. A tidal wave of mud, flowing out over the cobblestones… it was like a natural disaster in miniature, a small mudslide, one that nearly knocked the entire cart over. It startled the horses something awful, and, in the ensuing chaos, the gargoyle trapped inside managed to hightail it up the side of the house and out of view. The mess was _exquisite_.

The bruise father left on me afterward for letting the creature escape, on the other hand, was anything but.

That night, long after my father had gone to bed, I sat up with the lantern trimmed low, writing slow sentences and then scratching them out again. I didn’t know what to say to Percy—should I tell him how hard father hit? How tired I was? Perhaps how enticing the pier became when I got drunk late at night, wandering the city? I didn’t know how to break it to my only friend that his imprisonment was the only thing keeping me going.

I didn’t realize my tears were striking the mirror until I heard a slow tap of glass against glass. I vanished the mirror’s surface, allowing Percy to push the bottle out. 

_What_ _’s wrong?_ he asked.

I wiped at my face, making an unattractive sniffling noise. With a shaking hand, I responded— _I_ _’m fine, darling._

He barely had the bottle for two minutes before he was pushing it out again, with a little scribble in his native tongue that I took to mean _bullshit_.

I laughed, more of a wet slurp than an actual laugh. _Same trials, different day_ , I said.

His response was again prompt and to the point. _Leave_.

_Leave what_? I asked.

_Here. Leave here_.

_…I can’t_ , I said.

_No_ _‘can’t’. Go_.

_Go where_?

_Anywhere. Away. Take nothing, go_.

_And what, leave my best friend behind_?

I said it like a joke, but he was serious, more serious than I had ever seen him.

_Go_ , he said. _Take the mirror, free me, free us, we_ _’ll run together._

I bit my lip. He made a good point, but I… I couldn’t. I’d have no money, nowhere to turn—I’d be crawling back to my father within a week. The bars of my cage were relentless, squeezing ever and ever tighter.

But Percy… I sighed. He was right about one thing. I couldn’t condone leaving him in the mirror any longer. I’d been far too selfish for far too long to have kept him like this. He just wanted his freedom—and I needed to grant it to him, even if it meant he would leave me. Even if I’d be left behind, forever stuck here in my father’s grasp, until I lost it or my father did.

Thus I came to a decision. Breaking Percy’s mirror… that one would be on purpose. And that one went a little like… this.

***

I carried the mirror in my coat pocket, desperate to have it close one last day even if I couldn’t feel Percy’s hand through the cool glass. It soothed me, to know that he was right there, within reach. It gave me the strength to go on despite the fact that I’d learned long ago that I was a coward at heart. I had a plan, and I was going to stick to it. That night, after my duties were finished, I was going to take the mirror to the pier and dash it against the boards. 

If the resulting flood were to sweep me out to sea as well… if I were to go under and not come back up, well… that was fine by me. Whatever happened was meant to happen, I figured.

What I did not figure was that father would find the mirror before the day was done.

I should have realized. He was like a bloodhound some days, like he could sniff out each and every one of my misdeeds. It happened when I was in the ballroom, watching as father ordered around the servants as they set up for the gathering he’d planned for his clientele—one moment he was across the room, and the next he’d stalked right up to me, staring down with his cold, blue eyes, so like my own.

I watched with dread as he ordered all the servants out of the room, as he reached out for me. I should have run, should have just… taken off on foot across the room the moment I saw his hands rise, but I was rooted to the spot. The best I could do was flinch, throwing my hands in front of my face… but he didn’t strike me. Instead he pulled me closer by the collar of my coat and thrust his hand into my pocket, his face carved in a mask of fury as he pulled the mirror free.

“It was you?” he asked, faltering for a moment as he took in the mahogany, the lacquer, the ivory. “All those years ago? You were so young, how could you have…”

I didn’t respond, just thrust my chin forward in an act of defiance that I hardly felt. I didn’t need to speak, anyway—he was quick. By the time I came up with a deflection he’d already put the pieces together.

“That _bitch_ ,” he swore, fury blazing in his eyes. He took a step toward the door, but as he did I pried my foot from the rug and stepped shakily into his way. He went to side-step, and there I was again, blocking his path. Step, block—step, block—until finally—his entire body shaking with _rage_ —he spit out, “Henry, I will deal with you _later_ , now _get out of my way or I_ _’ll_ —”

“You aren’t going to hurt her,” I said, with a calm I didn’t feel. “…Nor are you going to take that mirror away from me.”

“What the _hell_ has gotten into you?” my father demanded. He stepped forward once again, but this time instead of heading for the door he stepped toe to toe with me, all but towering over my head.

I held my ground, what little of it I could. “I won’t let you pass,” I said quietly. “Now give… it… _back_.”

He stared down at me for a moment longer, his handsome face twisting into a caricature of himself. Then, in a motion that echoed back through my childhood, a motion that reverberated through every memory of every moment he’d ever tainted, he raised his hand and _struck_.

***

I don’t remember much of the fight. It’s hard to remember little things like that when you’ve got an arm wrapped around your neck, slowly squeezing the air from your lungs. All I remember is the mirror, reflecting sharp arcs of light at the corner of my eye—Percy, frantically banging on the glass—my father’s enraged snarl in my ear, and—just before the black spots encroached on my vision—before I blacked out—and my father won—I remember wrenching the mirror from his fingers and, in a last act of defiance, hurling it at the floor at our feet.

And now… now we’re here. Where the strike of glass against carpeted wood is like the clap of thunder, ringing through the ballroom. For a moment nothing follows, and I think I’ve lost consciousness—that I’ve lost everything. 

Then, all at once, comes a _flood_. 

It’s water and silt and kelp and fish and bottles and, more than anything else, pages upon pages upon _pages_ of waterlogged notes. It sweeps me off my feet, the force of it wrenching me from my father’s grasp. I choke and gasp, surging for the surface of the turmoil. By the time I find my hands and knees, my head above the water, there is a figure rising from the murk—a tall, bluish-green figure with wild curly hair near down to his waist, clothed only in thick kelp leaves.

I think, madly, that I’m dreaming once again. Perhaps I never stopped dreaming. The mirror and the notes and the webbed hand and the flooded ballroom and my mother, prying up the floorboards—it was all just a dream, just my sleeping mind, conjuring up a better reality than the one I’d have otherwise. I am barely holding onto consciousness—perhaps this is the moment that I’ll wake, four years old, perhaps crammed under my bed with my teddy in my arms, my father’s heavy footsteps pounding across the room until he leans down and seizes my ankle to pull me out.

But I don’t wake. I blink my eyes and I watch as the figure turns his face to me—a beautiful face, I can’t help but notice—and then to the only other person in the room. He looks my father, coughing up water, up and down once. And then he opens his mouth and though I’ve felt it only once and heard it never, I recognize the sound that comes out as siren song—thick and honeyed—as it drips, drips, drips down my spine.

It’s eerie. It’s ethereal. And my father… he is utterly bewitched. Paralyzed. All the way up until the figure lunges forward, sinking needle-sharp teeth into his neck.

I look away, my eyes squeezed shut and my hands planted over my ears. When I lower them again, there is no sound except dripping water, muted ripples, the flitting of fish. Nothing… until I hear a gentle _tap, tap, tap_ on the wall just beside me.

I whip my head over, staring with wide eyes up into his face. _Percy_. Beauty and terror in equal parts, wild but elegant, the blood cleaned from his mouth but splattered in his long hair. He leans down toward me, and I flinch back against the wall, pushing until I can go no farther.

…I don’t know what I expect. To share the same fate as my father, vocal cords ripped from my throat? The thought crosses my mind. But he doesn’t do anything of the sort—instead he raises one webbed hand, fingers spread, steady in the air before me.

Waiting. So, so patiently. 

I swallow, dragging a shaking hand from the murky water I’m sitting in, and… so slowly, so carefully… bring my hand up to mirror his. 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [strangers in the night](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24035263) by [em_gray](https://archiveofourown.org/users/em_gray/pseuds/em_gray)




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